“Thank you so much for cleaning my room.”
I said it to a woman I’d never met, holding a mop, standing in the doorway of my hospital room.
I had just given birth to my daughter. I was exhausted, sore, and happier than I’d been in a long time. A hospital cleaning woman came in to do her rounds, and something in me wanted her to know I saw her.
She stopped. She looked at me strangely.
“Did I do something wrong?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I just want to thank you.”
She looked at me quizzically. So I said it again, differently.
“I really appreciate having a clean room, and you made that happen.”
She smiled. She thanked me. And I don’t think anyone had ever done that for her before.
That was decades ago. I still think about it.
Why did such a small thing land so hard?
I don’t think it’s complicated. For a moment, in a job where people probably look past her all day, she mattered to someone.
I’ve come to believe that’s something we’re all after. The need to matter.
What our beliefs are telling us
I’ve worked with people for over thirty years now, and I’ve noticed something. Almost everyone I work with has a belief, usually formed in childhood, about the one specific thing they have to do to be good enough, important or worthwhile. And the beliefs are different from person to person.
We once worked with a consultant who looked forward to Mondays and dreaded weekends. That’s backwards for most people. His belief was “what makes me important is achieving goals.” As long as he was achieving something, he felt fine. The moment he wasn’t, the good feeling disappeared.
We also worked with a client named Jane who started feeling a sadness she couldn’t explain, right around the time her kids left for college. Her belief was “what makes me worthwhile is taking care of others.” As long as somebody needed her, she felt fine. The moment nobody did, the sadness showed up.
And I’ve had clients whose belief was that their worth depended on how they looked, or how much people liked them, or how many people they helped, or how impressive their career sounded at a dinner party.
Different beliefs, different strategies, but look closely and they’re all doing the same job.
Each one is a rule a person made up, usually before the age of ten, about how to earn the right to matter. Achievement is a strategy for mattering. Caretaking is a strategy for mattering. Being liked is a strategy for mattering. We just mistake the strategy for the need itself, and spend years defending one narrow way of getting there. That’s what keeps people stuck long after the original need could have been met a dozen different ways.
What happens when the belief goes
This is the part of the work I love most. When someone eliminates a belief like these, they don’t stop wanting to matter. That need doesn’t go anywhere. What disappears is the rule that said there was only one way to get it.
Picture a man whose beliefs made him feel his worth depended on how many hours he put in at the office. For years, dinner with his family happened without him, and he told himself it couldn’t be helped. Once those beliefs were gone, leaving on time didn’t feel like giving something up anymore. Taking an afternoon off for his son’s soccer game didn’t either. His work still mattered to him. He just didn’t need it to prove anything anymore, which meant there was suddenly room for a dozen other ways to matter that had been sitting right in front of him the whole time.
Fanny at the pool
My parents lived in a retirement community in Florida, and there was a woman there named Fanny who I used to see at the pool.
Fanny had the same aches and pains as everyone else there. She’d lost people. Her body didn’t do what it used to do. But she had more joy about her than any of the other women her age, and I wanted to know why.
I asked her.
She told me she’d decided a long time ago that she wasn’t going to be miserable. So instead of sitting with her complaints, she volunteered as a teacher’s aide. She helped kids with their lessons and gave them hugs when they were upset. She read to the blind.
Fanny wasn’t chasing one thing. She’d found a dozen small ways to matter to the people around her, and she moved between them freely.
It’s difficult to be unhappy when you’re contributing that way.
What I hear from clients
Over the years, I’ve watched belief work change people’s lives in ways that still move me.
Cathy in Australia no longer wakes up anxious. Jud in Texas, who had never had a healthy relationship, is now married to the love of his life. Annie in Syria is doing business across the Middle East because she eliminated the belief that had her too afraid to fail. Sue in London finally speaks up and takes a stand for her own life.
What strikes me isn’t just that their lives got better. It’s what they each did with the freedom once they had it, and how different those things were from each other.
Sue started mentoring younger women at her company. Annie started training other business owners in her city. Jud shows up for his marriage in ways his old belief would never have let him. None of them were told to do any of this. Once they weren’t locked into one strategy anymore, they each found their own way to matter, and no two of them found the same one.
That variety is the evidence, as far as I’m concerned. The need underneath was always the same. What it looks like on the outside is different for every single person.
You don’t need a program to start
You don’t need a title, a platform, or a bank account to matter to someone. You don’t need to wait until every belief that’s ever held you back is gone.
You need a person in front of you and a minute of attention.
Ask the person bagging your groceries how their day is actually going, and mean it. Tell a coworker specifically what you noticed them do well, instead of a generic “good job.” Call the friend you’ve been meaning to call, not to catch up, but to tell them what they mean to you.
It costs almost nothing. Notice what it does to you, not just to them.
Next steps
If you suspect there’s a belief running the show in your life, one narrow rule about what it takes to be good enough, our free belief-elimination program is a good place to start. You can find it here: https://www.recreateyourlife.com/free/
And if you’d like to talk it through with me directly, I offer free strategy sessions where we look at what you actually want, what’s been in the way, and whether working together makes sense for you. You can apply here: https://www.mortylefkoe.com/application/
I still think about that woman with the mop, all these years later.
I hope wherever she is, she knows someone remembers.
